Buffing useless prefixes (and fixing itemization)

A player curses rolling health regeneration and health globe bonus on his lacuni. It does not matter what values he rolls. The properties are junk by themselves. That is the problem with itemization. In a balanced game, that lacuni would had been useful for a barbarian using thorns to kill and health regeneration and health globe to survive. Then every item would be useful to someone, no matter what property it rolled, only the value of the roll determines if it is BIS.

This thread lists the possible ways to buff the existing worthless properties.

1. Thorns

Allow primary stat to enhance its damage. Should also deal 1/2 of its damage to ranged enemies. (Could be in the form of a legendary effect)We may actually see thorn based tanker builds.

2. Health globe

Excess healing from globes becomes a HP shield for 5 seconds. 5 seconds is a pretty long time in combat and the beauty of it is that you can use it to guard against heavy attacks that you know is coming (like Baal's meteors) but that your total health pool and resistances might not allow you to survive even one hit.

3. Health regeneration

Increase effect by 50%, 100% and 150% respectively in nightmare, hell and inferno for PVE.Needs to be stronger in PVE.

Also increases the percentage element damage you do by 1/5 of the value it protects. For example, a Tal Rasha armor with 40 Arcane Mastery also increases your arcane damage by 8%. A archon wizard could stack those for boss-like damage, but of cause he will have terrible terrible EHP.

5. Pick up radius

Also increase skill AOE radius by 1% per PUR. Will we see other classes stack this? Full screen blizzard anyone? The suggested 1% per PUR is to prevent it from been an OP stat. For example 40 PUR is considered really good already, and user has to sacifice a pretty decent amount of stats to get that, so 40% increased AOE is actually a balanced bonus.

6. Indestructible (prefix renamed Invincible)

Also increases block rate by 3%

7. Crowd control reduction (prefix renamed Untouchable)

Also increases dodge by 2%.

8. Life on kill

Also heals the rest of the party within the player's pickup radius.

9. Bleeding

Tune down Skorn's bleeding value which is like 100 times more than any other item.Normalize bleeding to bleed X amount for 3 seconds. (retaining average total damage)Allow bleeding to stack and renew the timer of existing bleeding stacks.

Ie if a monster has a bleeding stack and you can make it bleed again before that timer stops, you renew the timer of the first stack. Thus you can build up a lot of bleeding damage against high HP bosses.

I like it, either make the useless stats useful, or just remove them. The pool of random affixes is large enough w/o having to deal w/ stats that are not useful at all. Single resists? remove these and fix the problems it will cause with monks. No one else really needs them at all.

I wanted to give this a bump because I love a lot of these idea, especially turning extra health from globes into temporary hit points.

My thoughts on each individual suggestion:

Thorns: We'll likely be seeing this soon, though I'm not sure about the ranged damage reflection. Wyatt mentioned something about adjusting a few skills for each class to synergize better with thorns, so I think the ability to reflect damage to ranged enemies might be baked into skill runes instead of the actual affix itself. Either way, I love this change.

Bonus Health From Globes: Love the concept, numbers may need some tweaking. Maybe half of the extra health after a full heal becomes temporary hit points instead of the full amount, or possibly a cap of 20% of max health as temporary HP to prevent people from stacking it sky high and never even taking damage to their main health orb. Another suggestion I've seen is to add Bonus Health bonuses to direct healing skills (namely the Monk healing skills, I don't remember if any other classes have similar skills), though this might work better if it was worked into the individual skills rather than the Bonus Health affix itself.

Health Regeneration: I agree that this could use a buff, but I'm not sure if a straight numbers buff is the right way to go. I don't have any better ideas though, and a straight numbers buff would go a long way towards making it more viable.

Single Resists: This is an interesting idea. I agree to an extent with the point Tinaktu makes that defensive affixes should remain as defensive affixes, but the potential benefits in terms of gearing diversity of having boosted elemental damage may be enough to make a change like this worth it. Overall I support this idea, especially since it ties in with individual skill selection instead of being a direct DPS boost like the current % elemental damage on items, giving more of a sense of investment in builds.

Pickup Radius: I like the idea of PUR boosting the radius of certain skills, but I think it would be better if that functionality was added to certain skills/ skill runes (runes that increase AOE could increase the area by the players bonus PUR rather than the flat amount they currently use) rather than the affix itself. Off the top of my head, a few skills/ runes that might be viable with this buff:

Indestructible: Block chance could be useful if shields ever become desirable. This would be a welcome boost to hardcore players, and could be very useful in PVP whenever the full PVP gets released. Something that I had been considering for Indestructible was an additional flat damage reduction equal to 1-2x the ilvl of the item it rolled on. A source of flat damage reduction would be highly desirable as a defensive affix to combine with the mitigational affects provided by armor and all resist. It would just have to be balanced so that no one could gear defensively enough to render themselves immune anything in Inferno.

Crowd Control Reduction: I don't really see any major issues with this. It works as intended, and I don't really know of any reasonable way to buff it, or even if it needs a buff. If there's an issue with this at all, it's that it's just a very situational affix, since there are only 3 CC effects that it reduces, and of those 3 one is completely avoidable (frozen), one doesn't stop you from attacking (jailer) and the last one (nightmarish) just stops you from dealing damage for a brief period. I think the best way to make CC reduction a more attractive stat would be to simply implement a few more CC/ negative effects that are actually worth trying to reduce. Maybe affixes that worked similar to the Necromancer's Decrepify or Dim Vision curses would help to make CC reduction a more desirable affix.

Life on Kill: Agreeing with Tinaktu again that on kill mechanics as a whole need a buff, not just this one. They work great on low difficulties, but are useless in high difficulties. For an affix to be desirable, it needs to have some mechanic that allows it to be useful in high difficulties either on its own or in conjunction with skills/ other affixes, or it needs to scale in some way with all difficulties. This is the reason why affixes like Thorns and Indestructible are considered useless, because Indestructible is outclassed in high difficulties and Thorns doesn't scale with anything, so it's useless past Nightmare/ Hell.

Bleed Chance: Love the idea, though I again agree with Tinaktu that the proc chances should be subject to each skills proc coefficient. A good middle ground would probably just be to up the proc chance on the items they roll on. The idea of allowing increasingly potent bleeds to stack is one I love though, since I really want players to have viable ways of dealing damage that aren't centered around CC/CD. The coming changes to Thorns should alleviate this somewhat, and this would be another great way of opening up another viable method of dealing damage.

On the whole, this is a great set of ideas and I support most of them. I'm going to do everything I can to keep this thread on the front page to help boost its visibility, because more people (especially Blizzard) need an opportunity to see this.

A player curses rolling health regeneration and health globe bonus on his lacuni. It does not matter what values he rolls. The properties are junk by themselves. That is the problem with itemization. In a balanced game, that lacuni would had been useful for a barbarian using thorns to kill and health regeneration and health globe to survive. Then every item would be useful to someone, no matter what property it rolled, only the value of the roll determines if it is BIS.

This thread lists the possible ways to buff the existing worthless properties.

1. Thorns

Allow primary stat to enhance its damage. Should also deal 1/2 of its damage to ranged enemies. (Could be in the form of a legendary effect)We may actually see thorn based tanker builds.

Primary stat enhancement seems unnecessary. I'd say full damage to ranged enemies would be good. Wiz and DH need something to make thorns viable. Tanking with wiz/DH is really not optimal (unless you're those uber wizards in that one thread).

2. Health globe

Excess healing from globes becomes a HP shield for 5 seconds.Only way to make stacking this worth it.

That's actually a really good idea, allowing excess healing to overheal and act as a buffer.. Interesting affix, changes your skill build and play style. Make it so!.

3. Health regeneration

Increase effect by 50%, 100% and 150% respectively in nightmare, hell and inferno for PVE.Needs to be stronger in PVE.

I agree it needs to be stronger, but I disagree with your implementation. I'd just straight bufff health regen so you could stack it and get good heals.

4. Single resistances

Also increases the percentage element damage you do by 1/5 of the value it protects. For example, a Tal Rasha armor with 40 arcane resist also increases your arcane damage by 8%. A archon wizard could stack those for boss-like damage, but of cause he will have terrible terrible EHP.

Disagree. Resistances are supposed to be about defense, not offense. I agree single resistance is worthless, but making them a pseudo damage stat is not the solution I prefer.

5. Pick up radius

Also increase skill AOE radius by 1% per PUR. Will we see other classes stack this? Full screen blizzard anyone?

Strongly disagree with buffing AOE damage radius. Pick up radius does need some more utility for non-WD classes, but buffing AOE damage ranges is not the way to do it.

Tune down Skorn's bleeding value which is like 100 times more than any other item.Allow bleeding to stack.Bleeding not affected by skill proc rates, just its own chance to proc.Each stack of bleeding causes the next stack to double in potency.

For example, enemy is bleeding for 100 damage for 5 seconds. 2nd stack 200 damage for 5 seconds. Total 300.3rd stack 400 damage for 5 seconds. Total 700.4th stack 800 damage for 5 seconds. Total 1500.5th stack 1600 damage for 5 seconds. Total 3100.6th stack and on 1600 damage for 5 seconds. Total 3100. (Because the first stack has ended)And so on.Faster proc and different sources of bleeding can stack the multiplier very high to become a viable source of damage. You can play with 500 primary stat, low weapon damage, no CC, no CD and still do viable damage. A team of bleeding stackers could potentially be the fastest Uber killing team.

Bleeding does need some help. I disagree with setting it as it's own proc chance, it needs to work with the base proc chance of skills. The stacking idea is neat, might work well!

Great post of well thought out ideas, even if I disagree with some of them. This forum needs more post like this, with constructive criticism and ideas and less blizz scapegoating.

A player curses rolling health regeneration and health globe bonus on his lacuni. It does not matter what values he rolls. The properties are junk by themselves. That is the problem with itemization. In a balanced game, that lacuni would had been useful for a barbarian using thorns to kill and health regeneration and health globe to survive. Then every item would be useful to someone, no matter what property it rolled, only the value of the roll determines if it is BIS.

This thread lists the possible ways to buff the existing worthless properties.

1. Thorns

Allow primary stat to enhance its damage. Should also deal 1/2 of its damage to ranged enemies. (Could be in the form of a legendary effect) We may actually see thorn based tanker builds.

Primary stat enhancement seems unnecessary. I'd say full damage to ranged enemies would be good. Wiz and DH need something to make thorns viable. Tanking with wiz/DH is really not optimal (unless you're those uber wizards in that one thread).

I don't know how closely you follow the blue posts, but it's been mentioned I think twice already that Thorns is going to be adjusted so that it benefits from main stat- i.e. 1 point of main stat will boost a players Thorns damage by 1%, just like normal damage. Along with that, Travis seemed to indicate that several skill/ skill runes were going to be reworked to synergize better with Thorns, which leads me to believe that all classes will have certain skills or skill runes that allow Thorns to effect ranged attackers in some way.

I don't know how closely you follow the blue posts, but it's been mentioned I think twice already that Thorns is going to be adjusted so that it benefits from main stat- i.e. 1 point of main stat will boost a players Thorns damage by 1%, just like normal damage. Along with that, Travis seemed to indicate that several skill/ skill runes were going to be reworked to synergize better with Thorns, which leads me to believe that all classes will have certain skills or skill runes that allow Thorns to effect ranged attackers in some way.

Oh, ok, I did not know that blizz planned to do that. I like that more skills an abilities will use thorns, but I do not agree with the other change to thorns. But hey, I'm not designing a multimillion copy selling game here, so maybe it will work.

I feel the need to point out that last bit is not sarcasm, I really do think blizz knows what it's doing most of the ti8me.

A player curses rolling health regeneration and health globe bonus on his lacuni. It does not matter what values he rolls. The properties are junk by themselves.

I'd disagree with this for the regeneration. It's fairly effective but it still could use a boost in the numbers on a few item slots to make it more useable.

2. Health globe Excess healing from globes becomes a HP shield for 5 seconds.Only way to make stacking this worth it.

Why not let health globes stack and be a slow input of health over say 5-10 seconds. In other words say you pickup 5 globes for a total of 50,000 health. Yet you are at full health. Let those feed into your life over 5 seconds and let the globes keep on stacking as you get them. The life shield is a pretty cool idea to.

3. Health regeneration Increase effect by 50%, 100% and 150% respectively in nightmare, hell and inferno for PVE.Needs to be stronger in PVE.

I'm not sure what you are saying here. But actually if we just boosted the numbers on a few item slots this would keep people from over stacking and provide a higher and more useable amount.Why not Chest armor up to 1000, shields up to 1000, shoulders up to 500. (this includes legendaries)

8. Life on kill Also heals the rest of the party within the player's pickup radius.

I like this but I'd want to see a larger radius, simply make it 20 yards. Otherwise you have ranged needing to stand right next to melee which is sort of self defeating.

Yea - not to get into a tirade about anything in specific, but i agree, alot of the affixes are just so "lame". Theres so much better that could have been done (and should have been).

Not sure what you all think about this , but i was thinking about ways to increase the overall skill diversity with the current limitations to gear / skills, and i got to thinking, what if there was different tiers of skill modifier affixes.

Now not all skills have direct damage that could increase with affixes like this, however, theres other things like durations, range, , cooldown reductions, etc, that could also be set up like this. I also realise that in some form, this exsists on some items, but the trivial minor numbers that are being used, makes it all so feeble.

The other thing of course, is to make sure that only suitable gear is granted these affixes on generation. That in itself is a huge flaw in this current iteration.

Ultimately, people want choices, and they want to be able to say to themselves, "hmm - i think i want to make a high speed teleporting melee sorc. Perhaps, there should be Skill granting affixes for outside the norm class useage as well.

"Equipping this grants the use of Frenzy".

I dont know, theres so many different possible ways to go about bettering the system, but as is now, its really got no pizzaz, or flare, if you will.

Another thing that really bothers me, is Blizzards constant claims that no one wants to faceroll content (aka : ToC, lowering proc rates, hidden diminshed returns, Smoke Screen duration reductions), as it isnt fun. Wait just a minute, EVERYONE loves to reach a break point where they are now godly. It exsisted in D2 , and people do enjoy it. Stop worrying about game balance so much, and nerf nerf nerfage, and sometimes just go with a buff.

First off, I agree that there are more effective things to roll than Health Regen and Health Bonus from Potions and Globes, but 1) if enough Health Regen is stacked, it can save on potion use during downtimes, 2) if enough agility is taken advantage of with increase to health for Health Globes, especially for characters who have stacked as high as 70, 80, and even 90k LIFE, high enough buff to that stat can mean crazy amounts of life restored on a single potion that, at least for now, only restores 12.5k Life. So again, I do agree there are better things to roll...but if those things are focused on, they can be useful.

That being said, while I want to agree with some of these changes you proposed in the lower part of your post, the biggest problem I have with it is that it means those affixes would need to be entirely changed. They wouldn't be single resistances, ignores durability loss, pick up radius, etc. And the amount to which you're making them more complex would require an insane amount just to NAME THEM!!

Besides which, some of those things are already covered! You say Ignores Durability Loss should increase block chance...aaaaaaaaaand, that would do what to the "+X% to Block Chance" affix?

You say excess health healed from a Health Globe becomes a HP shield for 5 seconds...first off, 5 lousy seconds? Only viable in a battle. Outside of a fight, pointless as it'll just run out.

Like I said, I want to agree with those ideas, but honestly, instead of each affix doing a million things at once, I'd rather just have MORE affixes to choose from on gear.

Yea - not to get into a tirade about anything in specific, but i agree, alot of the affixes are just so "lame". Theres so much better that could have been done (and should have been).

Not sure what you all think about this , but i was thinking about ways to increase the overall skill diversity with the current limitations to gear / skills, and i got to thinking, what if there was different tiers of skill modifier affixes.

Now not all skills have direct damage that could increase with affixes like this, however, theres other things like durations, range, , cooldown reductions, etc, that could also be set up like this.

The other thing of course, is to make sure that only suitable gear is granted these affixes on generation. That in itself is a huge flaw in this current iteration.

This already exists in a sense in game, i.e. for a skill like Magic Missile the damage boost on Wizard items can range from like 5-6% to 14% (IIRC) on Inferno level items, so I don't think there's much of a need to further increment these kind of affixes. Honestly, I think a better way to deal with skill affixes would be to remove them entirely from items and put them somewhere else. I posted a little while back an idea I had been working on for a while about how the charm system that was in development before release could be worked to provide a lot of skill bonuses designed to boost select skills with functionality adjustments rather than straight numbers buff, along with other non-skill bonuses that would be OP if allowed to stack on gear. I encourage you to take a look and let me know what you think:

I'm not sure what you mean by making sure affixes roll on suitable gear. The developers have already stated that off stats will no longer roll on class specific items (though I don't remember if this is slated for 1.0.8 or not), and the idea behind the suggestions we're making is to make it so that no matter what combination of affixes a piece of gear rolls it's useful for someone. As I recall, that was the original intent behind a lot of the affixes, it's just that many of them, namely the ones the OP highlighted, fell well short of other affixes, resulting in the lackluster state of itemization we have now. Essentially the what we're suggesting is to make it so that players don't feel like things like bonus health or single resist rolls are wasted rolls, regardless of the piece of gear it rolls on.

one comment: life regen is already good when stacked. multiplying it by 2.5 would make it truly powerful on the 'overpowered' side of powerful

like that health globes 'over-heal', would limit it to 33%*(1+life%/1) of current HP (this way increasing the effect of life% at the same time. life% is a good affix already, but why not create some sort of synergy? there are so little (except for barbarian class..)

That being said, while I want to agree with some of these changes you proposed in the lower part of your post, the biggest problem I have with it is that it means those affixes would need to be entirely changed. They wouldn't be single resistances, ignores durability loss, pick up radius, etc. And the amount to which you're making them more complex would require an insane amount just to NAME THEM!!

This is actually a really valid issue, and one that would need to be addressed if any of these changes, or similar changes, are going to be implemented. However, given that Thorns is more than likely going to be given an interaction with a players main stat, adjusting an affix to have some interaction with other stats that isn't immediately obvious from its description wouldn't be unprecedented. I think it's very possible to strike a good balance between giving powerful boosts to underused affixes without making them too complex and difficult to understand by newer or more casual players, and without requiring long and convoluted descriptions on the actual items themselves.

Let's use Indestructible as an example. As it exists currently, all it does is ignore the base item's durability loss, which is crystal clear in its wording on the item: "Ignores Durability Loss." However, if the wording was changed back to Indestructible like it was in Diablo 2, it wouldn't be too difficult to add in a secondary defensive effect that could be highlighted somewhere else, such as the character details sheet. Let's take the OP's example of increasing block rate by 2% for each piece of Indestructible gear a player is wearing. The ignores durability loss functionality would be communicated to the player by the Indestructible affix on the item itself. On top of that, the boosted block rate could be communicated by adding a block chance/ block amount entry to the defensive section of the character details sheet. When a player mouses over that block chance line, a tooltip could pop up saying something to the effect of "Block Chance is a players chance to block an incoming attack with a shield. All shields have a base block chance, which is increased by 2% for each additional piece of Indestructible gear the player is wearing." This would accomplish the goal of giving a currently weak affix a strong secondary functionality while still allowing it to retain a relatively simple and accessible tooltip on the items it rolls on.

Many of the other suggestions listed here could be handled similarly, like Bonus Health From Globes. This already exists in the character detail sheet, and it would be (conceptually, maybe not technically), pretty simple to add a pop up box that explains how extra health from health globes becomes temporary hit points when a player is at maximum health.

All in all, yes, this is a valid issue, but I don't think it would be that difficult to find a way around it, and allow for both simple wording of the affixes on items, with more complex tooltips available for players who want them.

Pick Up Radius doesn't need to be buffed, the only thing that could be changed is that you could pick up items from that radius rather then walking over them.It's probably the most expensive stat which doesn't relate to damage going around.

Pick Up Radius doesn't need to be buffed, the only thing that could be changed is that you could pick up items from that radius rather then walking over them.It's probably the most expensive stat which doesn't relate to damage going around.

The fact that it's the most expensive non DPS/ EHP stat probably means that it's already powerful enough as it is and doesn't need any more alteration.

like that health globes 'over-heal', would limit it to 33%*(1+life%/1) of current HP (this way increasing the effect of life% at the same time. life% is a good affix already, but why not create some sort of synergy? there are so little (except for barbarian class..)

While I do like this idea, I don't really think life % really needs much more synergy than it already has. It's a pretty simple affix, and it works well with Vit, so I think giving it any kind of additional interaction with any other mechanic would really be overkill, especially when there are so many other affixes that need to be looked at before this one. The idea is interesting, but life % isn't really underpowered in any way, so I don't think there's much of a reason to go about altering it.

I'm going to go ahead and bump this because there are a lot of good ideas in this thread that really get to the core of a lot of the issues surrounding itemization and deserve more visibility among all the threads dedicated to flaming the game.